Distinctions

What would you add? What are you saying “no” to?

Whole communities, entire organizations are preparing themselves to defeat, thwart, slow, dilute unwanted changes. Antiwar, anti-apartheid, anti-discrimination, anti-authoritarian movements have made a huge impact during the last century.

Saying “no” certainly has its place but cannot, it seems to me, hold the central place in our lives. As humans we need a positive direction to move in, a life-giving vision to inform our actions. Love must be the foundation, the guiding principle and energetic source of our daily lives, otherwise we fall into pointless cycles of revenge/retribution, burn out with resentment when our best efforts fail or are not appreciated, become cynical tacticians concentrated only on winning.

The “no” I’m speaking about often has its roots in rage. But contrary to some current political analysis and even more substantial philosophical societal critique (as in Peter Sloterdijk’s “Rage and Time,” which tries to establish rage as the common theme throughout Western religions and political movements from Leninism/Maoism to contemporary neo-cons, and the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin and, we can now add, Donald Trump), rage is not a sustainable basis for long-term inclusive effective responses to human difficulties.

Rage can last a long time, as the troubles in Northern Ireland, the 50-year civil war in Colombia, the wars in the Middle East, the Muslim/Hindu conflicts in Kashmir and many other examples strongly attest. But what does it build? What does rage do beyond perpetuating itself and energizing us for violence and exclusion of others?

Only saying “no” or living from latent or simmering or volcanic rage will always keep us off-center. Counter-intuitively, both activities keep current reality going because our identity is caught up in pushing against it, resisting it, trying to destroy it. In such situations, we don’t know who we are when what we are saying “no” to or raging against disappears. We become like mercenaries, always looking for the next war and feeling anxiety and meaninglessness when there isn’t one to engage us.

We often know/sense/feel what we don’t want but are persistently unclear about what we do want.

Having a center to our life essentially means we are saying “yes!” Our bodies do all they can to continually say “yes” and find a way to keep us alive while we are breathing all kinds of air, ingesting all different kinds of food and other substances, working under pressure or outside of our circadian rhythm. Plants and animals do the same. (Of course there are limits: we cannot eat poison, and our body will expel it if we do. Animals and plants cannot live everywhere. Yet all these living systems organize themselves most essentially around “yes.”)

Joy, pleasure and bliss come from yes, as James Joyce powerfully reminds us.

“I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

― James Joyce, Ulysses

Yes brings the deep, unfolding mysterious chance to be in long-term intimate relationships with others.

And what else does it bring us? What does it bring you?

I’m inviting all of us during these dark times to step back from conversations focused on what’s wrong and what could get worse and how awful everything is and instead find the center of our life in “yes.”

Our upcoming Free Integral Learning Lab in San Francisco will address these topics with talks, music and exercises.

And the poems, book review, and exercise of the quarter will also support you in inquiring more deeply into saying yes.

Take care of yourself.

Love,

• In what ways, to what extent were my actions, conversations, planning based on saying, “yes”—i.e. moving in a positive direction to have something happen?
• How were my actions, conversations, planning arising from my saying “no”—i.e. from fear, anger, defensiveness, pushing away what’s happening?
• What effect did these different orientations have on my sense of being alive, my relationships, my mood, my effectiveness? From what I learned in this exercise, what will I alter in the next period of observation?

Just a Ride

Jem

Life, it’s ever so strange
It’s so full of change
Think that you’ve worked it out
Then BANG
Right out of the blue
Something happens to you
To throw you off course
And then you

Breakdown
Yeah you breakdown
Well don’t you breakdown
Listen to me
Because

It’s just a ride, it’s just a ride
No need to run, no need to hide
It’ll take you round and round
Sometimes you’re up
Sometimes you’re down
It’s just a ride, it’s just a ride
Don’t be scared
Don’t hide your eyes
It may feel so real inside
But don’t forget it’s just a ride

Truth, we don’t wanna hear
It’s too much to take
Don’t like to feel out of control
So we make our plans
Ten times a day
And when they don’t go
Our way we

Breakdown
Yeah we breakdown
Well don’t you breakdown
Listen to me
Because

It’s just a ride, it’s just a ride
No need to run, no need to hide
It’ll take you round and round
Sometimes you’re up
Sometimes you’re down
It’s just a ride, it’s just a ride
Don’t be scared
Don’t hide your eyes
It may feel so real inside
But don’t forget it’s just a ride

Slowly, oh so very slowly
Accept that
There’s no getting off
So live it, just gotta go with it
Coz this ride’s, never gonna stop

Breakdown
Don’t you breakdown
No need to breakdown
No need at all
Because

It’s just a ride, it’s just a ride
No need to run, no need to hide
It’ll take you all around
Sometimes you’re up
Sometimes you’re down
It’s just a ride, it’s just a ride
Don’t be scared now
Dry your eyes
It may feel so real inside
But don’t forget enjoy the ride

Saying Yes. Again and Again.

Lisa A. McCrohan

I loved you
long before I ever met you.

Long before I ever knew
the contours
of your face,

before I ever wrapped my arms
around your waist;

before I ever knew
what made you
laugh or cry,
scared or feel alone.

I loved you long before I said

YES.

Yes
to your kisses
and comforting embrace

Yes
to snuggling with you
and making love with you

Yes
to spending the rest of my life
with you.

But what I am discovering lately
is this:

The funny thing about love
is that you have to
keep saying

YES.

Yes
to trash night and
cleaning the bathroom

Yes
to sharing a bank account
and a mortgage

Yes
to long labors
and sleepless nights

Yes
to unexpected losses
and missed opportunities

Yes
to being vulnerable
and choosing to join each other
when we’d rather jump ship.

We have to say yes –
to all of it –
the happy and ecstatic moments
as well as the sad and mournful moments.

We have to keep saying yes
year after year –
and sometimes
minute
by
minute!

We have to choose to say yes,
this moment,
this breath.

So on the day I stand
in front of our family and friends,
I’ll say yes to you –
in that moment,
with that breath,

and all the breaths
I am to have.

Letter from the Graduate Directors

Dear graduates,

Are you actively coaching right now? Is your coaching practice as robust as you envisioned upon graduating the PCC?

If not, why?

Chances are that shortly after certification—once you exited the ‘greenhouse’ of growth and support that was your PCC cohort—your ideas about yourself were no longer challenged daily. Perhaps your resolve dissipated, or your desire to contribute changed shape.

It’s also possible that your clients became more challenging, cases more complex. Though you’ve likely done some further training or deepened a practice you picked up during your PCC year, it does not inquire as deeply into the fullness of human life as our methodology is designed to do.

This is why it is important to recognize that coach training is a multi-year endeavor. Becoming an effective coach requires that we are constantly encountering ourselves and our work in fresh ways. The PCC touched on lots of important aspects of human transformation, each of which warrant vastly deeper study. Towards Mastery is a chance to do this—and to keep our own development edges alive, increase the resources available in our work with clients, and ensure our call to service remains vibrant.

In the spirit of making this opportunity more accessible, the upcoming Towards Mastery course in San Francisco is changing format to include two in-person sessions and one session online. Feel free to contact us any time to talk more about deepening your Integral Coach education.

Love,

Adam Klein and Sahar Azarabadi

Grad News

Tana Heminsley (2007) received the 2016 ICF Vancouver Charter Chapter Coach Impact Award. This is the highest award category in British Columbia for coaching excellence at an individual partnership level. Well done Tana!

The students and faculty of Singapore “K” celebrate after their certification in November. Well done, friends!